Band of brothers sticks together

Pfc. Alan Carroll recalls Army investigators coming to his bedside a couple of days after he was shot four times in the Nov. 5 rampage at Fort Hood.

He didn’t want to talk about it then, and doesn’t want to talk about it now.

Ask Carroll what he really wanted to do, and it was get back to his guys. He didn’t like the fact that they were coming to the hospital at Fort Hood to see him — laid up.

“I kept telling them, the doctors and the nurses, I kept telling them they’d better get me out pretty soon because if they didn’t I was getting out myself. They started getting mad at me because at night I’d turn the machines off and show them I can breathe by myself, I can go to the bathroom by myself, I could do everything by myself, I don’t need them there anymore,” said Carroll, who turned off machines that administered oxygen, IV fluids and one that tracked his pulse and respiration.

“My heart’s fine, I’ve got the blood in me now, I can live by myself, I don’t need to live off a machine, but they kept yelling at me,” he added. “It’s just the way I am. I couldn’t stand being in the hospital and them making it seem like it was a lot worse than it really was because the only person that felt the pain, about getting shot and everything, was me that day, and I had all my battle buddies and everybody else I knew back at the company sitting there grieving about everything going on, and I felt like that I needed to be there with them.”

He added: “I needed to get out of here. They don’t need to come up to the hospital and see me tied up to all these machines and all these lines in me. I just need to get out of here and go back with them and let them know that, hey, you know, I’m doing good, grieve with them a little over the soldiers we lost that day instead of having them try to worry about me and making sure I’m fine in the hospital.”

Carroll, 21, of Bridgewater, N.J., was in Darnall Army Community Hospital from Thursday hours after the shooting through Sunday afternoon. He would have stayed longer at the post hospital if the doctors had gotten their way.

But Carroll was what professionals in the medical business call a “noncompliant patient.” If you’ve never heard the term, you aren’t alone. I first heard it from my doctor.

I guess he was talking about me.

In any case, I asked why people in the medical business were so eager to develop a superpill that would counteract high blood pressure, cholesterol and diabetes. Call it a holy grail of sorts in pharmacology.

It was, he explained, to get all the noncompliant patients in line, the ones who won’t take four pills over the course of a day.

From what I could tell, Alan Carroll is the ultimate noncompliant patient. After escaping the soldier readiness center at Fort Hood, where the mass shooting occurred, he came back to consciousness after collapsing and fought to go back into the building. His buddies, badly wounded, were in there and he wanted to get them out.

At the hospital, the Army tried to persuade him to quit and accept a medical discharge. True to form, Carroll not only told them no, or hell no, but began issuing warnings that they’d better cut him loose and let him go home.

Once out of the hospital and on 30-day convalescent leave, he started a workout regimen that included time in the gym and a mile-long walk with a rucksack on his back. He walked with a limp, as might be expected after being shot in the leg, but he worked the muscles until, one day, it was time to deploy.

In Afghanistan, Carroll has been out on dozens of missions with his buddies. There are hidden roadside bombs everywhere, more than half of the total found so far uncovered by troops in his 510th Clearance Company.

These aren’t just brave men, they’re a true band of brothers and they want to stick together. Talk with Carroll and his friends and their desire to come home as one, to triumph over the shooting and a year in a part of the world that qualifies as a hellhole, comes through loud and clear.

You want to hug them, and that feeling grows stronger when you hear Carroll talk about what might happen if the Army tries to bring him home for the Article 32 hearing that will determine if Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan goes on trial for the shooting.

The evidentiary proceeding is supposed to start Oct. 12 in a small courtroom on Fort Hood.

“They said I might be going back in October but I won’t be, because something’s going to happen. I’m going to miss my flight. I figure they’ve got a hundred other people there; they don’t need me there. Something’s going to happen. I’m not going to miss it personally, but just something’s going to come up where I’m working on one of the trucks and completely forget about going back to Texas.”

Now, what was that about noncompliance?

“I want to go home, don’t get me wrong,” Carroll said. “But I just can’t stand the fact that I get to go back and do the stuff that I get to do and everybody else is here and doing the stuff that we have to do here. I want to go home when everybody else goes home.”